NORTHERN NEWS American Planning Association
Making Great Communities Happen
A Publication of the Northern Section of the California Chapter of APA
NOVEMBER 2016
Artist gives citizens simple tools to design their public spaces
Planning-related art by Cupertino artist/arts educator Jen Kinney via Next City
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HILE THE CITY OF SAN JOSE is in the midst of a makeover competition for downtown St. James Park, artist Corinne Okada Takara is inviting the public to create their own designs — using popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners, and cardboard tubes. The city has funding to completely rebuild the underused park in the next five years, and in the meantime is using the tax revenue from a special parks district to fund temporary activations. Takara’s Prototyping Public Spaces workshop (http://bit.ly/2dFCKX2) is part of that effort and aims to engage everyday citizens in public space design. As an artist who often creates public works, “I was noticing that our community meetings were scheduled often at a time when we weren’t getting a full representation of our community’s St. James Park, San Jose. Photo: Jason Su. The Park Design Competition Jury demographics,” says Takara. She started to made its recommendation to city council October 15. design projects that would get more people in on the conversation. For the first one, which took place as part of the spaces. She installed temporary furniture, 3D printers, Zero1 Biennial in 2012 (http://bit.ly/2dFDETv), Takada and modeling supplies in the spaces, and for three weeks visited San Jose schools to hear children’s ideas for creatively in a row, asked the public to “reimagine the very dead reimagining bus shelter design. She incorporated their input spaces they were in,” she says. into a full-size model, which included a hanging garden and Now, that furniture is being used at the St. James Park a tin-can phone that allowed visitors to listen to and record pop-up, a collaboration with the Alum Rock Educational more design ideas using a clever hookup to her iPhone. Foundation, whose main purpose is to improve education Visitors could either make physical small-scale models of opportunities in the Alum Rock neighborhood of San Jose. their own, or learn to design one on available computers Takara teaches at an art and design thinking camp for using CAD software. That project ended up laying the middle-schoolers there, and Kim Mesa of Alum Rock is groundwork for public art installations on bus shelters deeply involved in local neighborhood organizations and (http://bit.ly/2dFDnzH). in keeping the community informed about city actions. In 2015, Takara worked with the San Jose Public Library (continued on page 7) on a series of pop-up maker studios in underused public S E E PA G E 2 F O R A L I S T O F W H AT ’ S I N S I D E T H I S I S S U E